The transition between something being static in the page and fixed to
the top of the viewport is a bit jarring.
This commit adds a bit of animation so that, as elements become fixed,
they appear to catch up with the scrolling of the page.
See parent commit for the reason we’re doing this.
Currently our AJAX requests only work as `GET` requests. So this commit
does a bit of work to make them work as `POST` requests. This is
optional behaviour, and will only happen when the element in the page
that should be updated with AJAX has the `data-form` attribute set. It
will take the form that has the corresponding `id`, serialise it, and
use that data as the body of the post request. If not form is specified
it will not do the serialisation, and submit as a `GET` request as
before.
You’ll quite often be landing half way down this page. So the context
afforded by being able to see the phone number gives you some
reassurance that you’ve landed in the right place.
We anchor link to the relevant message in a thread. Which is good, but
it leaves the messages hard against the top edge of the viewport. This
looks sloppy. So this commit:
- makes each message focusable
- shifts the focused message with CSS to sit away from the viewport
> Once an inbound message has been received, there should be a way to
> see the other messages in the system from the same service to the same
> number. Both in and outbound. Nice inbox/whatsapp stylee view or some
> such. This way the context of the reply is understood.
>
> Initially will only see the outbound template, not the actual message,
> but we’re going to change this for the rest (soon), so that you can
> always see the full message for all outbound.
This commit adds two things:
a section on the dashboard to show how many inbound messages the
service has received in the last 7 days, and how recently an inbound
message has been received
---
Doesn’t show the contents of any messages, just like how the rest of the
dashboard is an aggregation, never individual messages.
a page to show all the inbound messages the service has received in
the last 7 days
---
This shows the first line of the message. Eventually this will link
through to a ‘conversation’ page, where a service can see all the
messages it’s received from a given phone number.
It’s a confusing proposition to have two features which are almost
identical. Even differentiating between them in the template menu would
be tricky.
I think the better thing to do is rename the whole feature to ‘send
one-off message’.
Then if someone wants to use there own phone number or email address,
give them a quick shortcut to doing that, once they’re in the flow.
In the background this reuses the ‘send yourself a test’ code, but
the user is never aware that they’re going through a different route
to send an individual message. So the proposition stays nice and clean.
Because manually editing the URL isn’t a great user interface, this
commit adds a search field to do this on the user’s behalf.
For this pass at the story it doesn’t do any validation – the user will
just get no results if they search by something which isn’t a phone
number or email address.
If the user navigates to a different ‘bucket’ of notifications (eg
delivered, failed) then the search term is reset, because they’ve
changed the filter which is at a level above the search term.
Because:
- drawing things in CSS is fun
- when we have inbound messages, having a tail pointing the other way
will help differentiate which messages are inbound
Things we don’t do with SMS messages any more:
- put paragraphs in them (we use `<br>` tags instead, to allow for
multiple linebreaks)
- pick them using radio buttons
- render the template’s name as part of the template
- render the phone number that the message will be sent from as part of
the template
You might need to scroll this page quite a lot to see where a
placeholder appears in your template – especially if you have a long
email or letter.
One of the things I’m trying to stop happening so much is a lot of
scrolling back and forth. This would happen if you were scrolling down
to see the placeholder, then back up to fill in its value.
So this commit makes the textbox ‘sticky’, ie it always stays at the top
of the viewport, even when you scroll down. This lets you see the
placeholder and the textbox side by side, no matter how long the
template is.
The code to do this mostly comes from the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit
(documented here: d9489a9870/docs/javascript.md (stick-at-top-when-scrolling)).
I had to add some extra CSS to make it look good when it overlaps the
content of the page, which the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit implementation
doesn’t really anticipate.
Because the email addresses can get pretty long, and have no spaces in
them, they sometimes break out of their containing box. This looks messy
and causes horizontal scrolling.
We’ve seen in research a user getting stuck playing with the
scheduler. They picked a day, but then didn’t want to choose one of the
options for that day. There’s no way to do this except pick a day and
then un-pick it.
What they ended up doing was clicking the grey back button, which took
them back to the previous page, making them upload their file again.
This commit adds a ‘back’ link for the scheduler. ‘Back’ seems like
sensible naming because that’s the thing that the user tried to click,
and the UI of a link matches the thing they clicked to get into this
situation.
Previously they were relative (ie percentages). This made sure that they
worked on mobile, when the letter might be narrower.
However it broke when the preview was more than one page, because
13% of the height of 2 pages is different to 13% of the height of one
pages.
This commit changes the positions to be pixel values, which match the
calculated percentage values when the preview is one page.
It’s uneven ever since we upgraded the toolkit. Guess it’s probably
allowing space for an arrow image. But I don’t like the arrow image
because it looks like it’s pointing at the ‘or sign in’ link.
So this commit overrides the button’s default spacing.
The delete link was designed to be used with a button, where it needs
some padding to separate it from the button.
We now have a case where it’s being used without an accompanying button,
so we need a variation without that padding.
Not sure what about the new radios is causing this, but they no longer
expand the size of the container, causing an overlap.
The fixed height was originally for performance reasons, but removing
it doesn’t seem to cause the page to jump around on load, so I think
it’s OK.
Not sure why we were doing this. But as part of the Elements upgrade
our back buttons got bigger (because they weren’t constrained by the
line in our `app.scss`) but any green submit buttons stayed smaller in
height, so didn’t line up.
This commit removes the override, so all buttons have the size that
Elements intended.
The Elements CSS was making the `label` and `input` of disabled radio
buttons `opacity: 0.5`. This was resulting in text that was:
- too pale, especially where we were nesting 16px ‘hint’ text inside the
label
- waaaay too pale when inside a link inside the label
This commit overrides elements to dim the disabled radio button by
making it’s text colour grey, rather than making the whole thing
semi-transparent.
The visual appearance of radio and checkbox form inputs changed in
GOV.UK Elements here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/296
This was subsequently reimplemented with different markup and no
Javascript here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/406
This has meant making the following changes to our app:
- changing the markup in our radio/checkbox macros to match the example
markup given by GOV.UK Elements
- removing the previous Javascript file because it’s no longer needed to
make the radios appear visual selected
- making the buttons on the scheduled job picker look like links,
because the grey button style looked weird with the new radio buttons
- SMS message preview gets slightly wider so it lines up with a 4/8
column
- Edit email box gets wider to match more closely the width of the
previewed and delivered emails
Not sure how these got out of line (maybe when we brought the date into
the left-hand text area). But this commit updates the percentages to
match the comments.
This is so it’s clear from the position of the link which part of the
letter you’re editing.
The textbox we use for editing letters is the same size as that for
email and text messages.
This is problematic because:
- it feels quite cramped – letters will often be longer than emails or
text messages
- it has a narrower line length than the printed letters (which is a
constant, unlike for emails and text messages)
The printed letters have a line length of 137.5mm and a font size of
12.5pt.
137.5mm = 5.41 inches = 389.7pt line length
389.7pt/12.5pt = 31.8em
So we could make the box 31.8em wide, but then it wouldn’t align to our
grid.
Our grid splits the page into quarters initially because this is how
wide the navigation is. So this means that we can use grid units of
1/multiples of four, eg 1/4, 1/8, 1/12, 1/16, etc. But the smaller the
denominator, the less effective the grid will be – it gets closer to no
grid at all.
After having a play around, 5/8 of the page looks closest to 31.8em.
Since the main column of the page is 3/4, we set a column of 5/6 width
inside that, which equals 5/8 of the total page.
Making the navigation narrower means that we have more space on every
page. So on pages where we had to use 16px type just to fit stuff on the
page we can now bump the type size up to something less miserly. This is
mainly the team and settings pages.
We still need to use 16px on pages which list notifications or previews
of spreadsheets, because we’re still trying to fit a lot of information
onto these pages, so every little space-saving helps.
Like the template ID this is an infrequently-used action on a template
and doesn’t belong at the same level as ‘Upload recipients’ or
‘Send yourself’ a test. We don’t think it’s information that’s useful to
working out which template you want to interact with, so it shouldn’t be
on the choose template page any more.
The email looks a lot like the normal content of a page (black on white
text, same font, rendered by the browser). It needed differentiating
visually.
This commit adds a border and spacing around the email to separate it
from the things on the page that you’re supposed to be interacting with.
This isn’t needed any more because:
- we’re moving toward not clicking the letter to preview it, so there’s
no need for a (not very intuitive) indication that it’s clickable
- we’re not showing letter templates on the same page as email and text
message templates, so there’s less need to visually differentiate them
(which also worked to limited effect)
Previously we only showed the top half of a letter template, in order
to conserve space and fit multiple letter templates on one page. Now
that we have only one template per page there is space to spare. So
this commit changes the letter preview to show the full height of the
A4 page.
This also requires increasing the resolution at which the preview is
rendered so that it still looks clean at the bigger size.
Letter templates have (or will have) multiple different editable
regions. I think that the most intuitive way for this to work is to have
- an edit link for each of these areas
- positioned next to the thing to be edited
Again, this isn’t fully hooked up, but since no-one is using letters
live yet this is a good way of getting research feedback and pointing
towards where we want the feature to go.
Uses percentages for the positioning so that the alignment is maintained
on mobile.
Not everyone knows how to use `ctrl` + `f`, and it’s not scoped to
just the list of templates.
The template you want to work with is often not the first one in the
list, but ordering by created at is useful for other reasons (mainly
around first time use).
This commit adds a find as you type control which aims to give users a
quick way of getting to the template they want to work with.
